“Do you think I’m going to end up with a guy who’s twenty-five years younger than I am? Come on,” Sassy said.
Sassy quietly unhoused her cub at the end of the summer.
And perhaps, in keeping with the clandestine nature of her cubbing adventure, Sassy and James are still friends. James is going to visit soon and he’s bringing his new girlfriend. Sassy can’t wait to meet her. And neither can we.
The Future
What we don’t know about older women/younger men relationships is a lot. In fact, we hardly know anything at all, mostly because there haven’t been enough of these relationships to draw any significant conclusions.
But it is likely there will be more and more of them in the future. At least according to the internet, which is filled with sites exploring the older woman/younger man dynamic. Sure, some of the couples look like models, but more often it’s just regular women like Meegan, forty-two, who has her own vlog and sums up the reverse-age romance like this: “Hey ladies, you’ve tried the younger woman/older man thing, and how’s that working out for you—huh?”
The future of cubbing is wide open.
chapter five
The Fifteen-K Face Cream, The Russians, and Me
“Where’s your apartment?” people would ask.
“The Upper East Side,” I’d reply, and they’d roll their eyes. The Upper East Side wasn’t cool. It was boring and shut down after sundown and there were too many strollers and too many old people and so no one interesting lived there. On the other hand, the fact that no hipsters or groovy people wanted to be seen there made the apartment, by New York City standards, somewhat affordable.
Unfortunately, it was the only thing in my immediate neighborhood that was.
Welcome to Madison World
I discovered this on my second morning when I set out to take a stroll. I hadn’t gone half a block when I passed a window display of glasses and, reminded that I could use a new pair, went inside.
With burled wood walls and cases decorated with cigar boxes, the small shop was more like a gentleman’s club where they happened to sell spectacles. A dapper young man came over and asked if I wanted to see anything. I pointed to a pair of tortoiseshell frames. I replaced my glasses with the empty frames. But I then had no idea how I looked, because without my glasses I was blind, like Piggy in Lord of the Flies.
“I don’t know,” I said. “How much are they?”
“Three thousand dollars,” he said casually, as if this were the going price for frames all over the world.
Three thousand dollars? Again?
“And then you have to add in the cost of the actual lenses. That’s another thousand each.”
In other words, five thousand dollars for glasses.
“Great,” I said, backing away with a big smile on my face.
I left the store feeling self-conscious. I didn’t belong in this neighborhood and everyone in the neighborhood knew it.
Madison World, I called it. Located between Fifth and Park, it was an Aladdin’s cave of gold and silver, of diamonds and jewel-encrusted watches, of crocodile shoes and dresses scattered with hand-embroidered crystals. In Madison World, women dressed in outrageous fashions and paraded up and down the street like it was the most glamorous runway in the world.
They knew I was an interloper. They could tell by my creased cotton pants, both practical and comfortable. They knew by my hair, untouched for weeks by the smoothing heat of the blow-dryer. But mostly they knew by my shoes—Havaianas flip-flops.
I was going to have to learn how to dress again.
Madison World Sticker Shock
You’d think I’d do the obvious thing: go into a store on Madison Avenue and just buy something. But shopping in Madison World doesn’t work that way. It’s a complicated process. There’s a lot of interaction with other humans who are
there to decide whether or not they are going to sell you their wares, whether or not you can afford them, and whether or not you should even be seen in them. Purchasing something in Madison World is like trying to get your kid into an exclusive private school.
Actually, the private school process might be more pleasant because you don’t have to get undressed in front of strangers.
But first you have to find something to try on.